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There is indeed. Take a look at require.extensions:

http://nodejs.org/api/globals.html#globals_require_extension...

Neat! With a little bit of googling, it seems CoffeeScript can do the same thing. That lowers the barrier-to-usage of compile-to-js languages enormously!

Now I'm looking at the sweet.js source where they register the extension, and there's some additional magic I don't recognize; is module._compile documented somewhere that I just can't find, or is that getting added somewhere in the sweet.js code?

I don't think it is. I seem to recall Isaac saying that he considers require.extensions to be a mistake, though I don't know if he meant the concept (extensibility) or implementation (register hooks under filename extensions). Either way, I think it's recognized that a lot of people enjoy and use the functionality so it's unlikely to go away.

As an aside, here's the relevant bit of code that loads the (already compiled) source as a module: https://github.com/joyent/node/blob/master/lib/module.js#L40...

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